Covid 19 – Our actions

Havant Homecare started to monitor the Covid 19 virus in December 2019 and then started preparations for potential infection in the UK in January 2020. We looked at the possibility of it being a pandemic and started to increase the amount of PPE (personal protective equipment) we needed to stock. We also looked at how we were going to approach interacting with customers and employees alike so as not to cause panic.

We wrote to our customers and at the same time designed a training course and had all employees in to ensure that they had a better understanding of infection control and understood the importance of protecting others from Covid 19. All staff were trained to ensure that they could answer questions at the point of need if a customer needed to ask questions as the media would soon be reporting quite aggressively about the virus.

We planned for interuption to our services and our staffing levels and implemented our own self isolation and deep cleaning processes to ensure our working environment was clean before lone working on reduced office hours were implemented. This lone working and isolation working will form part of business continuity plans if we suffer staff shortage later into the spread of infection across the UK.

We were fortunate to be ahead of many other providers and sourced an abundance of hand sanitiser, gloves and other forms of PPE before it disappeared from suppliers and shops. We are now into our second week of England being in lockdown to try and reduce severe infections overloading our NHS and to date non of our customers or staff have suffered signs or symptoms of Covid 19 and our plans remain in place and service continues to be delivered as it should be.

We would like to extend a very appreciative thank you to all of the team at Havant Homecare, it is early day’s in terms of infection rates decreasing but our team has done a fantastic job of protecting themselves and our customers and we are extremely proud of them all.